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Are we, then, to refer memory to the perceptive faculty and
so make one principle of our nature the seat of both awareness
and remembrance?
Now supposing the very Shade, as we were saying in the case of
Hercules, has memory, then the perceptive faculty is twofold.
[(And if (on the same supposition) the faculty that remembers is
not the faculty that perceives, but some other thing, then the
remembering faculty is twofold.]
And further if the perceptive faculty [= the memory] deals with
matters learned [as well as with matters of observation and
feeling] it will be the faculty for the processes of reason also:
but these two orders certainly require two separate faculties.
Must we then suppose a common faculty of apprehension [one
covering both sense perceptions and ideas] and assign memory in
both orders to this?
The solution might serve if there were one and the same
percipient for objects of sense and objects of the
Intellectual-Kind; but if these stand in definite duality, then,
for all we can say or do, we are left with two separate
principles of memory; and, supposing each of the two orders of
soul to possess both principles, then we have four.
And, on general grounds, what compelling reason is there that the
principle by which we perceive should be the principle by which
we remember, that these two acts should be vested in the one
faculty? Why must the seat of our intellectual action be also the
seat of our remembrance of that action? The most powerful thought
does not always go with the readiest memory; people of equal
perception are not equally good at remembering; some are
especially gifted in perception, others, never swift to grasp,
are strong to retain.
But, once more, admitting two distinct principles, something
quite separate remembering what sense-perception has first known-
still this something must have felt what it is required to
remember?
No; we may well conceive that where there is to be memory of a
sense-perception, this perception becomes a mere presentment, and
that to this image-grasping power, a distinct thing, belongs the
memory, the retention of the object: for in this imaging faculty
the perception culminates; the impression passes away but the
vision remains present to the imagination.
By the fact of harbouring the presentment of an object that has
disappeared, the imagination is, at once, a seat of memory: where
the persistence of the image is brief, the memory is poor; people
of powerful memory are those in whom the image-holding power is
firmer, not easily allowing the record to be jostled out of its
grip.
Remembrance, thus, is vested in the imaging faculty; and memory
deals with images. Its differing quality or degree from man to
man, we would explain by difference or similarity in the strength
of the individual powers, by conduct like or unlike, by bodily
conditions present or absent, producing change and disorder or
not- a point this, however, which need not detain us here.
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